The New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. 3

THE half century between 1559 and 1610 must assuredly rank as one of
the most brutal and bigoted in the history of modern Europe. The
massacre in Paris on St Bartholomew's day in 1572; the calculated
savagery of the duke of Alba's Council of Blood and the wild atrocities of
the Calvinistic Beggars in the Netherlands; the persecution of the Moriscos
in Spain—these were merely the more spectacular barbarities of an age
unsurpassed for cruelty until our own day.